sort o' wax
figures that look like books, made through habit by those that have been
many years upon the turf, and who work automatically; but every real,
live, throbbing, pulsing book was written by a man with a woman at his
elbow, or vice versa.

When twenty-one years of age Benjamin Disraeli produced "Vivian Gray." The
woman in the case was Mrs. Austen, wife of a prosperous London solicitor.
This lady was handsome, a brilliant talker, a fine musician and an amateur
artist of no mean ability. She was much older than Disraeli--she must have
been in order to comprehend that the young man's frivolity was pretense,
and his foppery affectation. A girl of his own age, whose heart-depths had
not been sounded by experience, would have fallen in love with the foppery
(or else despised it--which is often the same thing); but Mrs. Austen,
mature in years, with a decade of London "seasons" behind her, having met
every possible kind of man Europe had to offer, discovered that the world
did not know Ben Disraeli at all. She saw that the youth did not reveal
his true self, and that instead of courting society for its own sake he
had a supreme contempt for it. She intuitively knew that he was seething
in discontent, and with prophetic vision she knew that his restless power
and his ambition would yet make him a marked figure in the world of
letters or politics, or both.

For love as a passion, or supreme sentiment, ruling one's life, Disraeli
had no sympathy. He shunned love for fear it might bind him hand and foot.
Love not only is blind, but love blinds its votary, and Disraeli, knowing
this, fled for freedom when the trail grew warm. A man madly in love is
led, subdued--imagine Mephisto captured, crying it out on his knees with
his head in a woman's lap!

But Mrs. Austen was happily married, the mother of a family, and occupied
a position high in London society.

Marriage with her was out of the question, and scandal and indiscretion
equally so--Ben Disraeli felt safe with Mrs. Austen. With her he put off
his domino and grew simple and confidential.

And so the lady, doubtless a bit flattered--for she was a woman--set
herself to push on the hazard of new fortunes. She encouraged him to write
his novel of "Vivian Gray"--discussed every phase of it, read chapter
after chapter as they were produced, and by her gentle encouragement and
warm sympathy fired the mind of the young man to the point of production.

The book is absurd